Location-aware Devices, Privacy, and UI Design by Howard Rheingold is a solid treatment of the tough trade-off between this possibly very useful technology set and the privacy issues that it raises. I’m also interested in the set of issues as it maps to online social networks. I’ve thought, several times, that a granular approach to profiles on sites like Friendster and Tribe.net would be a better approach than the all or nothing/almost nothing approach that these sites currently employ. After all, I would, for instance, want a potential mate to see a different set of things about me than a distant buddy that I hit the pubs with once in a while. Not, mind you, in the sense that there would be a lack of integrity between the two.
New York Times: The Dean Connection Whether you are interested in Dean and his campaign or not, this article is a very interesting piece about the community dynamics and social network ties that the Dean is playing on virtually, and in a way, the lack of these same ties offline in some of American culture right now. In a way, it seems that Dean is creating a prototypical online community that is based on offline values. Very compelling stuff.
Wow, I am really really enjoying the newest Damien Rice(o). (MP3’s there for your checking out pleasure.)
For you iTunes Music Store users, it's also available there.
While I'm at it, let me, for a moment, lament the lack of an affiliate program for the iTunes Music Store. Affiliate programs have been a staple of Internet commerce for years now. People love to recommend music they enjoy. So where is the affiliate program Apple? Where is it? Are the margins so thin that you couldn't do that? I mean, really, duh.
Nate wrote up his experiences with using Contribute. Seems it was adding stuff to his markup, and based on my experiences, I can’t say that I am shocked. This seems to be a running theme with any type of Content Management System these days, and one that we have struggled with on PGA.com as well.(Todd mentioned this in the interview linked below.) It’s a difficult balance to strike between making sites easy to update, and preserving the perfect integrity of the code you posted in the first place. This is further complicated by the fact that the bulk of these tools were, for the most part, coded when crappy markup wasn’t considered such a big deal. My perception, especially from talking to the tool vendors that I have worked with, is that their attitude is the dreaded “it works on ie win32.” I’d like to see more effort put into standardizing the markup created by the browser based WYSIWYG editors, because that is where a good chunk of the problem lies. It’s tough to draw any conclusion to this musing, but the other place where the problem exists is one that a good content management system should let you have control, in it’s templating and element control system. Most, if not all, full blown content management systems do not give you this level of control.
WebReference.com has posted the Web Services chapter of Programming ColdFusion MX. I firmly believe that this is the best ColdFusion book on the market. I keep it on my desk and refer to it often.
It’s been sort of a crazy week since I arrived back in Atlanta last Monday. Lots of work in the four remaining workdays, primarily because of this event going on. We did a bit of work with Flash Remoting, my first foray on a production site into the use of that particular technology. Over the weekend, I just attempted to recover, from the previous two week stretch of travel. Yesterday, I played my first day of paintball in this “season.” This morning finds me with that soreness one has after dusting off little used muscles. In every part of my body except my knees, it is a welcome feeling. My knees however, don’t seem to like stairs much today.
Jeffrey Zeldman Presents: The Daily Report: “I urge you to add extra characters and situations to your movie so every inch of my screen bursts with action at all times.”
I got back last night, but was a bit too under the weather to get anything up on the site. My 12" Powerbook took a major turn for the worse on the Friday after Thanksgiving, forgetting somehow that letters before “r” in the alphabet existed. This lead to a jumbled, alphabet soup computing experience. Running Diskwarrior revealed that the Toshiba drive in the machine was about to fail. Shortly thereafter, just after I got most of the data off of the machine, it did. My experience may not be typical, but this is the second Apple laptop to have a major failure on me in less than a year. It’s under warranty, and no doubt it will get repaired, but the hassle these two failures have caused me is substantial. This week’s cost me several days worth of work, and I now find myself behind on a very important work project that has to launch this week. I backup on a regular basis. On the other hand, there is only so much you can do, especially when you are on the road. I wish I felt like computer equipment had gotten more reliable over the years, but I definitely do not feel that this is the case.
I've got a lot to be thankful for this year, and I take none of it for granted. A phenomenal family, great friends, a wonderful job with great co-workers, and, of course, the best cat in the history of pets. I think, aside from these obvious things that I am thankful for, the other big thing I am thankful for this year has been the opportunity to learn more about myself. In my opinion, we learn more about ourselves in times of difficulty than we do in the "salad days" of our lives. While I may not have been happy about some things that have happened to me in the last 12 months, they've really given me the chance to gain a little more wisdom about who I really am as a person, and I am very thankful for that opportunity. I'm a stronger person for it, probably more mentally tough than I have ever been.
This Rebuttal to Paul Thurott is pretty decent in pointing out the fact that Thurott’s claim that XP is far superior to Mac OS X is not backed up with more than a single argument, and a pretty weak one at that. Unfortunately, people don’t read pieces like the articles Paul Thurott writes with a skeptical eye, for the most part. So not only is he doing the technology, on both sides of the fence in my opinion, a disservice, he is also not following through on his responsibility as a journalist. Perhaps he knows this, I mean he must know this right? I mean, it’s pretty obvious to me. Right?
Roger Clemens says bye, and thanks. “What the fans have always done for me, being a power pitcher for 20 years, is to help get me going. When you take center stage out there, whether you feel good or bad, once you get on that mound, that crowd can really light you up and elevate your game. I talk about momentum a lot, and they can give that to us. If I’m trying to strike a guy out, the crowd can get me going and pump the team up.”
Thank you Roger, I never could have imagined that you would someday be playing for the Yanks when you were in Boston playing for the despised Red Sox. I never could have imagined that you would become one of my favorite Yankees of all time. So, thanks.
So, I returned to Atlanta last night after almost a week in Salt Lake City. It’s a nice, smallish city, and the Macromedia conference was interesting, although I didn’t feel like I learned nearly as much this year as I did last year. One of the reasons for this was the fact that I spent more time in my hotel room working than I did actually at the conference. The other thing, I believe is that I have spent the last year working with their latest versions, especially of ColdFusion, and so there was less new information to be had.
Brandon Purcell has posted a single resource online with detailed instructions on configuring multiple instances of ColdFusion 6.1. This is one of the features of 6.1 that Macromedia really feels they need to educate their user base on, because the feature has so many upsides to it.
Royale has become Macromedia - Flex. I am going to Macromedia Max this week, and I’m very interested to see this and what people are doing with Macromedia Central, which I have warmed up to in the last few weeks.
After reading Emergence (which I really enjoyed) and three Philip K. Dick books(all of which will be made into movies at some point), and getting halfway done with A Compact History of Everything over the last week and a half, I started in on NONZERO by Robert Wright last night. So far, it’s a really interesting book, looking at human history through the lense of Game Theory. I realized, however, that I am not familiar enough with Game Theory to truly appreciate some of the nuances of Wright’s work. This led me to gametheory.net which seems like a very comprehensive online resource for all things related to Game Theory.
Adactio sports an excellent Matrix Revolutions review, which is basically the review that I would write if I had the time and inclination. Most of the people who I went to see it with were not impressed. I, on the other hand, felt like it was a fitting third piece to the trilogy. The mind bend of the original film was not a reproducable effect.